(The "Abgesang") Thus spake the angel graciously: "The Lord with thee, Thou blessed she; The Lord's voice saith, Which breathes thy breath, That men have earned eternal death. Faith Saves alone from sin's subjection; For while weak Eve God's anger waked, 'Twas, Ave, thine the blest election To give the world peace and protection, Most blessed gift To mortals ever given!" In Nuremberg the veritable Hans Sachs wrote plays on Tännhauser, Tristan, and Siegfried between three and four hundred years before the poet-composer who put the old cobbler-poet into his comedy. Very naïve and very archaic indeed are Hans Sachs's dramas compared with Wagner's; but it is, perhaps, not an exaggeration to say that Sachs was as influential a factor in the dramatic life of his time as Wagner in ours. He was among the earliest of the German poets who took up the miracle plays and mysteries after they had been abandoned by the church and developed them on the lines which ran out into the classic German drama. His immediate predecessors were the writers of the so-called "Fastnacht" (Mardi-gras) plays, who flourished in Nuremberg in the fifteenth century. Out of these plays German comedy arose, and among those who rocked its cradle was another of the mastersingers who plays a part in Wagner's opera,--Hans Folz. It was doubtless largely due to the influence of Hans Sachs that the guild of mastersingers built the first German theatre in Nuremberg in 1550. Before then plays with religious subjects were performed in St. Catherine's church, as we have seen, the meeting place of the guild. Secular plays were represented in private houses.